In FLP102, we taught our students about the history of Hartwick and the Yager Museum, both in-class, and with a visit to the Oneonta History Center. We also talked about collecting paintings and other pieces of fine art.
I bought a copy of the Wednesday album “Rat Saw God” which is noisy snarly country-rock and suits my current anxious mood.
I voted, and got other people to vote. It didn’t help.
Weird tech week at Hartwick, where most of our network and computer infrastructure went down. We’ve muddled along as best as we could, but I would really like this to be resolved soon.
Despite the technical glitches, we held our annual “Horror in the Museum” Halloween storytelling event. We had a great turnout and a lot of wonderful readers. Thanks all!
Halloween was a lot of fun. Alanna and I took Hazel out to the west end of Oneonta for some trick or treating, while Dominic went out with friends. We don’t get a lot of trick or treaters on our street, but the weather was nice, so we sat on our stoop and enjoyed the evening together.
Now that the exhibit opening and “horror” are done, I got back to planning for an upcoming tribal visit.
In FLP 102, we taught the students about the history of comic book collecting, John Bloom’s fascinating study of Baseball Card Collectors, and hosted a visit from Hartwick College’s mental wellness office. We also turned our student’s 7-week/mid-term grades.
Most of my week was taken up with installing our newest exhibit “With That Shadow Over Them: Constructing Catskill Reservoirs, Remembering Home”. It’s a gorgeous exhibit, full of rich and complicated history, and I’m really proud of the way that it came together. The opening reception was Thursday evening, beginning with a talk by a really excellent talk by Anna Lehr Mueser, my co-curator with Rachel Gleiberman, Hartwick’s archivist.
Every Fall for the past few years, I’ve run an event at the Museum called “The Horror in the Museum”. It’s a Halloween storytelling event where Hartwick faculty, staff, and students read their favorite pieces of short, spooky Halloween fiction. Many of participants are excited to read, but don’t always know what to choose, and so ask me for suggestions. This, plus my being a voracious reader and appreciator of horror, means that I have a running list of great short spooky stories. What follows is some stories that I’ve suggested to readers over the years, other short stories that I love, and others that have stuck with me for various other reasons. If you’re looking for some bite-sized Halloween-season scares, these are tasty morsels! (Also, there’s no particular order other than how I wrote them!)
I ran across this story in the wonderful anthology “The Weird” edited by the Vandermeers. Most people read “the Lottery” in high school, but this story leaves that in the dust. Very little actually happens–a wealthy family, staying in their summer cabin somewhere away from the city they normally call home, decides to stay into the fall instead of going back. That’s it, that’s the story! And yet, by the last page, I was white-knuckle clutching the book, gasping at each subsequent sentence. It’s a stunning piece of prose suspense.
I found this in some 1970s anthology that I picked up for the cover art. It’s a satisfying story of childhood vengeance, wrought on a patriarchal and violent father. Also, never forget the visceral creepiness that comes from a child describing the actions of an imaginary friend!
I think it’s one of Lovecraft’s best short pieces. For one thing, it features an unusual HPL narrator; a nationalist German U-Boat captain, and a consumate materialist, contra Lovecraft’s usual array of idealistic dreamers and seekers of hidden knowledge. For another, it leaves most of the supernatural element off-stage (or rather, out the porthole), giving the whole thing an ambiguous menace. A masterpiece.
Laird Barron is one of the best horror writers working today. He writes cosmic horror like Lovecraft did, but he’s a much better prose writer than Lovecraft with a propulsive and minimalist tone that makes his work really gripping. That’s all display in “Old Virginia” which is the first Barron story I remember reading, and one of the best–a past-his-prime private security merc gets roped into guarding an isolated military facility in the Appalachian mountains, and slowly learns what it is he’s guarding. It’s too long to read out loud quickly, but I can imagine it would be stunning to hear performed.
I performed this story a few years ago, and unfortunetly had to edit it to get it down to our 15 minute timeslots. That’s a shame because so much of of the strength of this story is in the small details, from the architectural descriptions of the house in the eponymous print to the quotations from fictional histories, guides, and catalogs scattered throughout. Plus, it’s a story about the secrets of objects, something near and dear to my heart, as an archaeologist and curator.
My first memory of this story is hearing it told by Tony Barrand in his Folklore class at Boston University. His rhythm captured both the terror and the humor of this story (“the severed hand fell right into her lap!"), and he also talked about how uncommon it was for folktales to have active, smart women as protagonists. This is an old story, certainly hundreds and maybe thousands of years old. There’s a good summary of the history and alternative versions of this story here
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. Link here
I know everybody has read this. Read it out loud to yourself sometime. Read it in the mirror. Watch yourself read it, watch how your face changes when you describe the old man’s eye or the narrator’s fury and terror when the heart begins to beat. This is an amazing story to hear performed well.
“The Yellow Sign” by Robert W. Chambers. Link Here
Lovecraft loved this story. So did the guy who created “True Detective”. It’s definitely late-Victorian in style–florid prose, lots of moralizing about the neer-do-well artists and models who are the main characters, etc… But the fundamental strangeness of this story starts on the first page, and grows to encompass the whole world. It’s genuinely terrifying to watch the play “the King in Yellow” taking over everyone’s consciousness, like the ocean carrying a piece of driftwood out to sea.
I’ve read Evenson stories over the years in varous anthologies, and always apprecaited his austere, meticulous prose. This is from his collection “A Collapse of Horses”. His stories straddle lines of genre, but always with a fundamental weirdness to them, that sometimes spills over into horror, as it does here, and other times he keeps pulled back. In that, he reminds me of Robert Aickman; both of them are skilled at finding a sense of menace in the mundane. This is a great introduction to what Evenson does well–the end of a gritty western, when the outlaws ride away, injured and dying, and what they meet in the darkness beyond the horizon.
I read this in a Lovecraft-inspired anthology with the unpreposessing title “Cthulhu 2000”. There are some good stories in it, but the best ones (see also “Black Man with the Horn” by TED Klein, or “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai by Roger Zelazny) keep Lovecraft’s more direct influence off the page. Nowhere is that clearer than in “Shaft 247”, a science-fiction story about guards in an underground facility who discover some anomalies in the eponymous (and supposedly uninhabted) shaft. I haven’t re-read this in years, but I still think about simple lines from that story, and the terrifying thrill of their simplicity. “Something is turning the bolts from the other side”
We celebrated Indigenous People’s Day at Hartwick College (and at the Museum) with some food from the communities of Indigenous students, as well as the saying of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address or Ohenten Kariwatekwen. We are also screening “The Oneida Speak” for the rest of the week, in honor of the day.
In FLP102, we talked about how to register for classes, as well as talking about the history of collecting in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
I am frantically working to finish the design and installation work on “With that Shadow Over Them: Constructing Catskill Reservoirs, Remembering Home”. We open next week!
I watched “The Undbinding” a “documentary” about a group of ghost-hunters and haunted object collectors who are sent a strange statue that was found in the Catskills, near Ellenville, NY. I usually don’t care much for ghost-hunter type shows and movies, but this was really well done, and legitimately scary in places, despite being mostly narrated by talking heads.
I finished reading “The Traitor’s Son” by Pedro Urvi. I read it to Dominic and it was so bad that in multiple places I tried to get him to let us stop. It’s self-published on amazon and it shows–poorly written and edited, and way too long. It is a boring derivation of Harry Potter-esque anonymous-kid-learns-he’s-a-hero YA fiction with a Skyrim-like world. I am delighted to be finished with it and never have to read it or anything else by Urvi again.
I spent a lot of time re-jiggering our work study schedule, which has undergone some changes in the last month–students requesting different work times, students reducing their hours, etc…now I have to hire some more people to make sure we have enough coverage.
My brother’s birthday was Friday, and while he’s on the other side of the country from me, we usually have a phone call and have a good round of catch up.
…and actually last week as well. It’s been a real whirlwind couple of weeks!
In our FLP102, we talked about the Sir Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum. We also introduced our students to wikipedia, in preparation for their wikipedia assignment.
I met with members of CGP’s “Strategic Planning” class to tour collections and talk about future collections initiatives.
Last weekend, we took our annual trip to the North Shore of Massachusetts. We finally managed to get onto a whale watch and avoid hurricanes. In line with previous trips, we hit up Gloucester and Rockport, as well as Boston’s North End. But we also went up to Portsmouth, NH and the Rye Science Center, as well as the town of Marblehead, MA, the latter of which left me spellbound. We did NOT go to Salem, which wasn’t hurting for visitors over the weekend.
Since coming back from Massachusetts, I’ve been working on coordinating an upcoming NAGPRA tribal visit, and finally managed to get plane tickets and hotel rooms booked this week. Still a lot to do before November, but that big mountain has finally been scaled.
I also spent time working on the de-installation of Velocity and Position, in preparation for our new exhibit about delaware county reservoirs.
I also did a lot of planning and logistical work for our upcoming Indigenous Peoples' day event at Hartwick.
We went up to our friends' cabin in St. Lawrence County, and stayed overnight with them. It’s always tiring to stay in a new place with our kids, but the scenery and the cabin and the company were absolultely delightful. Thanks, Tracy and James!
I finished reading Lisa Goldstein’s “Ivory Apples”, which is a wonderfully dark modern fairy-tale, wicked step-mother and all. The ending left me a little cold, but the ride to get there was genuinely great.
In FLP102, we talked about Greek temple collecting and the origins of Museum tourism, as well as cabinets of curiousity in the middle ages.
We had a great meeting that will move forward our goal of creating an Indigenous artist residency here at the Museum. Stay tuned! I also did some work with the College’s Indigenous DEI Committee to plan some Indigenous People’s Day events.
Our friend Ian, who directed the award-winning film “A Bullet Pulling Thread” came down to screen his film at SUNY Oneonta. Alanna organized everything for the screening, which was a great success, and we got to spend some time with our good friend.
In FLP102, we had the students take the VIA Strengths survey, and then started talking about collecting in ancient mesopotamia.
We did some more design planning for the reservoirs exhibit.
It was Alanna’s birthday this week. We didn’t have time for a big evening to do, so we did cake and presents with the kiddos, and then on the next day, I took her out to lunch.
We bought a car! We paid for and took possession of a 2021 Toyota Prius Prime. The main thing I’ll say about it, other than that it’s quite comfortable to drive and ride in, is that it has an astonishing number of buttons. Good thing I’ve been playing video games since I was 6!
I finished reading “For the First Time, Again” by Sylvain Neuvell, the last book in the “Take them to the Stars” trilogy. It was still good, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as the first two books; to my mind, it lost some of the interesting ideas that made the first two books so compelling, in the service of tidily resolving the stories of the main characters.
I also finished reading “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American life” by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields. It’s a dense book, and I’m still digesting its complex analysis. I am intrigued by the idea of thinking about the American concept of race as analogous to witchcraft, not to mention the utility of parsing race, racism, and racecraft as distinctive but overlapping processes. But there’s a lot more going on here, and I want to digest it a little longer.
I attended a meeting of Hartwick’s Indigenous DEI committee, to work on planning events for Indigenous People’s Day.
We mostly recovered from COVID during the first part of the week.
Tuesday and Wednesday were College-on, school-off days, so Alanna and I traded off the kids. On Wednesday, they joined me at the Museum, which became a hub for a bunch of other kids whose parents had to drag them to work on the last days before school. We had fun, but it was an exhausting day.
In FLP102, we read a survey article by Russell Belk, talked about how to read reference works in college, and then we read excerpts from Amy Azzarito’s “The Elements of Home” about the social history of candles, globes, and mirrors.
I did some more work study coordination, always a full-time job during the first weeks of the semester.
We also did some work on the long-term project of trying to buy a new car.
Our kiddos started school–Kindergarten for Hazel and 6th grade for Dominic! It’s a big adjustment for both of them, and they’re flying like pros. I’m really proud of both of them.
I did some more work on our upcoming reservoir exhibit, particularly design. I also did some long-term planning on our indigenous artifacts exhibits.
Every Fall for the past few years, I’ve run an event at the Museum called “The Horror in the Museum”. It’s a Halloween storytelling event where Hartwick faculty, staff, and students read their favorite pieces of short, spooky Halloween fiction. Many of participants are excited to read, but don’t always know what to choose, and so ask me for suggestions. This, plus my being a voracious reader and appreciator of horror, means that I have a running list of great short spooky stories. What follows is some stories that I’ve suggested to readers over the years, other short stories that I love, and others that have stuck with me for various other reasons. If you’re looking for some bite-sized Halloween-season scares, these are tasty morsels! (Also, there’s no particular order other than how I wrote them!)
